I like this near empty bowl. It held so many days of colorful leaves just a short while ago. Now look at it. Some leaves, a hunk of wood, some lichen and an old rusty drill bit. It is like a little short story of interesting characters that were left to keep each other company. I thought about giving them the toss but am not ready. Not yet.
More thought is going into doing the small book of dementia poems. I know how it would be illustrated….a tether line in soft graphite that the reader follows through the pages…sometimes it is slack, other times stretched thin. And broken, and tied back up, and full of knots and frayed…but it finds its way through the pages and past each poem.
I will resist making the book accordion style even though it lends itself to one continuous piece of rope. There will be more poems than what would be wieldy in that form.
And poetry is so vertical! It would have to be similar to the last poetry book I made, “Distance Matters”. That one worked well with all those woodcuts made to fit the format. It will be a dilemma because the words want to be vertical and the tether wants horizontal. There is no way to have the tether vertical without looking like it is hanging….not a connotation I want…that’s for sure.
And poetry stanzas don’t look right side by side. That is a bit like taking the Empire State Building and making it into two adjacent high rise apartment buildings.
Plus you can only have one poem per page. Some will fill the page, others won’t. I think the tether line needs to run along the bottom of every page…maybe the longer poem pages is where it gets stretched thin or breaks to let the words in.
Here are two shorter ones I wrote two days ago and today.
Going to Town
He is the passenger.
I have buckled him in,
turned up the heat,
and backed out of the garage.
We are going to town.
There are lots of curves
to go around.
He grabs an imaginary wheel
to help me steer.
Before long we both are making
squealing, screeching noises,
and arrive laughing
and safe at our destination.
The Well
I tie on another length of rope
and lower the bucket deeper
into our well of memories.
We wait for the splash
as it sinks in the darkness.
I hold on tight and count to three
before pulling it back to the surface.
Together we peer into the stillness.
He watches and waits
for me to tell him
what it is
and when it was.
Anyway, I will draw some images of the tether line to use when I get it all figured out. The main thing is to keep writing for now.
And speaking of drawing, here are the last two gloves. This morning I started on hats…fifteen more pages to go and I can move onto my new book without the haiku and maybe a bit of color.
I will be back….